The Journal's all-purpose sports report.

Still King in Seattle

Felix Hernandez’s new deal makes him the highest-paid pitcher in baseball.

Most of the general managers in baseball probably sleep fairly well at night. But if baseball general managers were haunted by the ghosts of Barry Zito and Johan Santana, it wouldn’t necessarily be surprising. These limping ghosts would, besides favoring their respective throwing arms and shoulders, have a similar message for their hauntees—be really careful about offering ultra-rich free agent contracts to pitchers. The chains of nightmarish nine-figure deals past and present would make a lot of noise, probably. But the Seattle Mariners, and GM Jack Zduriencik, have some reason to hope that the record-setting seven-year, $175 million deal that the team signed with ace Felix Hernandez on Wednesday will be a different sort of story.

The deal was announced last week, hit a snag when an MRI turned up something small-but-terrifying earlier this week, and was back on when Hernandez was given a clean bill of health. The resulting contract, while supremely generous, also makes a certain sense—Hernandez is, after all, already a Cy Young Award winner at the age of 26, and undeniably one of the best pitchers in baseball and certainly one of the few who might conceivably be worth that sort of money over the next seven years. Perhaps just as importantly, the deal contains a conditional but team-favorable clause that will kick in should Hernandez get seriously injured. This is all good for the Mariners, but none of it quite explains the giddiness—”Have you ever been happier to see a rich person get richer?” Jerry Brewer asks in the Seattle Times—that attended the deal.

Nor does it explain why Hernandez was so emotional on Wednesday. For that, the most compelling explanation is also the most sentimental one—Hernandez is as happy as anyone would be to make $175 million, but is especially happy to do it in Seattle, with the team that signed him to his first pro contract. “If you watched the conference, there’s simply no questioning Felix’s devotion to the city and the team,” Lookout Landing’s Jeff Sullivan writes. “You might questionwhy he feels such devotion, but there’s no question that he does… Felix belongs to Seattle. Seattle belongs to Felix. These days, a lot of marriages fail. I’ve got a good feeling about this one.”

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Bullfighting is, if viewed from a certain perspective, one of the most elemental of contests: a bullfighter and a bull, some rituals and some ritualized violence, and the most decisive outcome imaginable for the doomed bull. That spare and stark—if richly embellished—entertainment has attracted and repelled literary types for a long time, but the sport itself appears to be on its way out in a world increasingly unwilling to accept its central violence quite as readily as Ernest Hemingway did.

In Outside Magazine, Eric Nusbaum attends a bullfight in Mexico City and finds a sport fully ensconced in its own tradition and style, and thus weirdly out of time, in both senses. “Is violent death, like Hemingway says, really “one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental?’” Nusbaum wonders. “Violence, like anything else, happens in context. A bullfight is a lavish and carefully orchestrated ritual. It hardly feels simple or fundamental, even in the primal way that hunting does. Before being liberated by death, the bull is made to suffer through pre-ordained phases of injury at the hands of the picadores and banderilleros. He is humiliated and taunted by the matador, who postures with mad ego, making light of death, and light of his alleged opponent.”

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Two moments of Fixer-breaking-the-fourth-wall in two days: not necessarily the best look. But while I want to take my chance to reiterate all the nice things Jeremy said about Adam Thompson, our dear and recently departed editor—a good if perhaps overly tall dude who is very patient and very good at his job—I also want to fill you in on some changes coming around here. Don’t worry, it’s a good thing.

The Daily Fix has changed in some small but noticeable ways since I wrote my first one back in March of 2008, but in many ways is still very similar to the concept and column that Jason Fry and Steve McKee created over a decade ago. We’re not going to mess with the idea of the Fix being a compendium of the best writing on the most interesting sports topics of the day—it’s a good idea, and I for one can’t come up with a better one. But we will be streamlining the Fix, and working—on the fly, because that’s how the Fix does—to come up with ways to bring the Fix into what historians will one day call The Age of Bieber. What this will mean we don’t quite know yet, but by all means please offer your suggestions on what you think works, what you want more or less of, and what you’d like to see here. We’re still working on it, and your thoughts are, as always, welcome. My email address is right below these words.

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